Step 1: Understand your role in helping your patients access the NDIS
Your role as your patient’s treating healthcare professional is to help them apply to the NDIS by:
- completing the treating professional section of their access request form
- helping them contact the NDIS
- providing information about their disability and their impairments
- providing information about their impairments and the effects on their day-to-day function.
Step 2: Assess your patient’s day-to-day functioning
You'll need to provide supporting evidence on what your patient is able to do and how their impairment affects their functional capacity and ability to do day-to-day activities. These are referred to as functional domains.
When you’re assessing their functional capacity, you’ll need to objectively consider:
- the tasks they can do without support, aids or modifications, including clear task-specific examples
- how their impairment impacts their functional capacity in day-to-day tasks, employment or interactions with their community, including examples
- what supports are already in place from family, carers, services and community and what needs are unmet even with these supports
- what type of supports and aids they need, how often they need them, and how they help them become more independent and less reliant on informal supports
- how supports will improve their social and economic participation.
We’ll consider the age and quality of the information when assessing the evidence.
Learn more about how to determine whether your patient is eligible for the NDIS.
Step 3: Complete the treating professional section of the access request form
You can help your patient by completing the treating professional section in their access request form.
This section helps assess your patient’s eligibility for the NDIS by providing evidence of how their disability and impairment impacts their functional capacity.
Step 4: Provide evidence
You’ll need to provide evidence to help support your patient’s application to the NDIS.
You should include any relevant reports, clinical letters or assessments from one or more of your patient’s treating healthcare professionals.
You can prepare your own letter or report if you have the right skills and experience. This needs to include any information you’re qualified to provide.
Evidence you need to provide to validate your patient’s impairment can include:
- the name of the condition and a description of the impairment(s) related to this condition
- the date of diagnosis or onset and how long the patient’s functional capacity has been affected by the impairment
- any relevant diagnostic information including who diagnosed the condition and any clinical assessments used to confirm their condition and related impairment
- whether their condition is terminal or degenerative.
Patients with psychological disability
You’ll need to help your patient complete the evidence of psychosocial disability form if they have a psychological disability.
Download the evidence of psychosocial disability form:
- Evidence of psychosocial disability form (PDF 654KB)
- Evidence of psychosocial disability form (DOCX 319KB)
Make sure any information about the permanency of your patient’s impairment includes:
- a summary of the patient’s disability from when it first began to now
- a description of past, current and planned evidence-based treatments for the condition and resulting impairment
- a description of all engaged, evidence-based practice interventions, including medical, allied health and lifestyle-based interventions
- the frequency, duration and dosage of treatments and management interventions
- the response and outcomes of treatments and management interventions
- other details that affect treatment outcomes and functional capacity, including social and environmental factors
- anticipated future functional capacity.
Patients with impacted functional capacity
Make sure any information about the impact of your patient’s impairment on their functional capacity describes:
- the tasks the patient can do without support, aids or modifications, including clear task-specific examples
- the tasks the patient requires support, aids or modifications to be able to do
- clear examples of which parts of the task they need support with, the specific impairment affecting the task, and the type of support, aids or equipment needed.
The language you should use
Include a summary in easy-to-understand language when you use medical or clinical terms to describe impairments, treatments and clinical presentation.
The summary should clearly explain how the patient’s impairment affects their ability to perform day-to-day tasks.
Learn more about what is supporting evidence for your patient.
After the evidence is ready
Give evidence directly to your patient to include in their application to the NDIS.